Description
Chevron Publishing, Hardbound, 256 Pages, ISBN: 9771031612128, First Published, 1992 **VERY RARE BOOK IN PERFECT CONDITION**
The hardest decision we at Chevron have recently made has been to produce The Great Race before the end of the same year in which the race was run. While we also decided to produce its sister annual publication Australian Motor Racing Year in the same time frame, there was a difference — we could start preparing material for MRY right through the year. Not so with The Great Race.
Some work was able to be part-completed pre-race; the ATCC and miscellaneous bits and pieces were about all. So to get the correct perspective on the Bathurst entry in October, you really need to cover the nine ATCC races, Amaroo Park's AMSCAR series and the Sandown 500 race in September. Only then can you really make sense of The Great Race entry, who the drivers arc, where they come from — and after all that you need to be ready to put in a pretty heavy week on Mount Panorama in October.
The fact the weather was rather dismal for the 1992 race only made it all the more difficult, but at every turn — be it with people, vehicles, location or weather — there is a story to be told. This year's race was not only miserably cold, wet and full of unintended action. It was the 30th anniversary of the race being held at Bathurst, the 40th anniversary of the organising body, the Australian Racing Drivers Club — and it was also a sad race with the passing of the highly popular Denny Hulme.
This book, The Great Raceisithe annual story of the Tooheys 1000. It is the 12th annual edition and covers the 1992 race, supplementing our history book Australia's Greatest Motor Race — the first 30 years, 1960-89. In this annual you will find out how the race evolved from work started by hundreds of people many months before. There's a million stories in Bathurst's Race Week of October — television can't cover them, the huge programme can't cover them, but this book goes as close as you'll ever get to covering most of them.
Chevron uses a combined team of some 14 journalists, photographers and researchers to cover Race Week. Within four weeks of the race, they had poured over more than 6000 photographs and prepared and captioned over 400 of the best, and produced over 80,000 words and statistics on and about the 1992 Tooheys 1000.
We hope you enjoy every one of them ...
When we first announced that our two annual motor sport books The Great Race and Australian Motor Racing Year were to be published before Christmas, some of our veteran and more familiar readers said we couldn't do it — it had never been done before in the 21-year history of MRY, or the 11 years of TGR.
But we at Chevron were adamant, and most of our free time (?) in 1992 was spent planning the onslaught to make it happen. What had happened to our schedules was that as our first half calendar year filled with major race programmes and the James Hardie 12-Hour, so the books, if not finished by January tended to slow down with the workload.
Group editor, Steve Normoyle, rearranged the workload, drove home new deadlines to researchers and journalists, and worked with art and production to get the service areas and printing deadline problems solved. Not only were they short deadlines, but they came at a time when printers were trying to fill long-standing Xmas orders.
That it all came together in the end' (we swear Normoyle probably worked on the old saying "She'll be right on the night") hasn't really been a miracle — it's been an example of how a small business, leaned down by the recession, took old ways and means by the throat and gave them a terrible shaking.
What has emerged is a new publishing time for Australia's two most important collector books, publishing for December each year now they are sure to solve a whole lot of Christmas present problems around Australasia. Everyone concerned should take a bow.
Meanwhile, Chevron continues as Australasia's most prolific motor sport publisher, producing more than 12 major motor sport programmes each year, publishing the nation's only motor sport colour magazine, various historical and personality books and having the biggest motor sport direct mail service for all these, plus motor sport posters and video tapes.
